Bitcoin Struggles With Price Below $6,000, Market Cap Below $100 Bln

After months of staying relatively stable, the price of major cryptocurrency Bitcoin plunged below $6,000, and is down around 11.6 percent as of 12 am ET. The sharp variation is believed to be due to the uncertainty surrounding bitcoin cash’s hard fork.

Other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum and Ripple, also experienced a major sell-off.

Bitcoin cash declined around 18 percent ahead of a hard fork scheduled for November 15. As per reports, the bitcoin cash protocol will split into “Bitcoin ABC”, or core Bitcoin Cash, by developer group Bitcoin ABC, and “Bitcoin SV”” short for “Satoshi’s Vision”, led by blockchain research company nChain.

Bitcoin Cash itself emerged as a result of a hard fork from bitcoin in mid-2017, after a group of developers wanting to increase bitcoin’s block size limit prepared a code change.

Bitcoin reached $5,390.12 Wednesday, hitting a new low for the year, and market cap falling below $100 billion, for the first time since October 2017.

Bitcoin was trading at $5,613.28 as of 12 am ET Thursday, down 11.6 percent over a 24 hour trading period, with a market cap of $97.54 billion.

For the majority of the fall, Bitcoin was trading comfortably around the $6,400 range.

According to coinmarketcap, Ripple was down 10.3 percent at $0.456253, but beat Ethereum to be at the second spot with a marketcap of $18.37 billion. Ethereum was at $175.98, down 14.8 percent, with a market cap of $18.16 billion.

The market cap of the entire cryptocurrency market plunged, and is currently at $183.25 billion, down more than 70 percent since the start of this year.